Sparkplug CEO Dishes on Wireless Broadband Expansion, Differentiation

XC: With such critical data as health care records, as just one example, on the network, disaster recovery and business continuity have become key concerns of businesses, organizations and regulators. What is Sparkplug’s view on business continuity?

Malloy: I would describe ‘backup’ in a different way than I think we used to think of it in telecom. Time was, I think we’d always have something, call it redundant or on standby, because it’s a data-driven world. We’ll also see this from carriers who use us for backhaul and transport and network extension – I know that I need x amount of capacity and bandwidth and I know I need to continually scale it. So what you have with fixed wireless and Sparkplug is the ability to have an easily scaleable solution that you can put right alongside or on top of what you already have. It doesn’t mean it has to sit there idle. You’ve got the full redundancy, you’ve got it immediately for failover. You’re good to go across both of the networks should anything happen to one or the other. But, more importantly, you have the ability to scale alongside of your other network. It’s fully diverse back to the PoP.

XC: What is Sparkplug’s growth strategy for the second half of 2008?

Malloy: We’re continuing to expand our networks in each of our cities. Recently we announced that we’ve now expanded considerably the number of businesses that are covered in Chicago. We’re doing the same in each of our markets, both geographically in terms of the number of businesses they cover, and also we’re adding considerable capacity so we can serve more and more of the higher-capacity customers – where you do get in the upper reaches of the 10mbps symmetrical service and on up into the 20s, 40s and 50s. We’ve been building our plant to go deeper and provide those kinds of capabilities and services, and at the same time, go wider to cover more businesses. You’ll see more announcements in that regard.

I think the other piece you’ll see is that we continue to look at other markets where we want to enter, and we’ve stated publicly we’d enter one of two ways. We’d go there and start building on our own, or acquire a company. I wouldn’t name markets or give you a calendar because that’s something we keep internal.

XC: How is Sparkplug differerent from Towerstream?

Malloy: First off, in addition to the enterprise market that we serve, we also have the carrier and the wholesale piece of our business. We provide the backhaul and transport services for the cellular carriers, wireless mobility providers – Sprint Nextel, Verizon. I think that’s a clear distinction. And I think the fact that we do that lends a lot of credibility to the large enterprise market that we serve. That’s a business model differentiation between us and them.

I think the other way that we’re very different is we’re very locally-based. We’ve got a real strong local presence in terms of our people who work on the network, as well as respond to customers, and the sales and account management side. We learned those lessons when we built businesses in wireless mobility. People want to feel good about the fact that you know the territory, you know their needs and you can get them provisioned quickly. You can grow their bandwidth quickly, groom it, and I think we’re known for our local presence more so than they are.

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